Anton Martynov

BIOGRAPHY

Anton Martynov is a blogger and professional photographer, an author of numerous reviews on photo equipment and articles on the basics of photography and image processing, an expert in the theory and practice of photography, photography instructor and collaborator with the leading photography projects. In his professional activities he worked on computer-based special effects for advertising and movie industries for a long time, cooperated with the leading advertising agency networks and now works as an advertising photographer and photo retoucher.

COMMENT

The "film-like colors" phrase has lately become a kind of photographers' Holy Grail sought by everyone; everybody tries to achieve them by adjusting equipment settings and processing images with software. This has a great deal of common sense because photo films were designed based on aesthetic principles. In the teams that were designing films for decades, artists and fine art experts had the decisive force, but not engineers and marketing specialists. As a result, the media had the artistic properties that suited certain (and quite large) groups of people.

During the time of "analogue vs digital" battle, digital technologies have achieved a lot and we see that formally they have won the war: film manufacturing plants are closing and the manufacturers of photo equipment are going digital. However, this war led to one very important loss for everyone, namely, that "color aesthetics" that was achieved with analogue film technologies by hard work of engineers led by artists and fine art experts. This is emphasized by 50 million Instagram subscribers and a billion dollars paid by Facebook for this unsophisticated application, which means that people already understand and feel that the honest "digital colors" are not so interesting as the colors on film with its unique aesthetics.

In this respect, Fujifilm has a great edge over its competitors because today it is, as far as I know, probably the only photo equipment manufacturer having a vast experience with film technologies and, most importantly, using them in its current product range. The colors that X-Pro1 gives are very much like the Fujicolor films: Astia, Provia, Velvia reversal films and Neg color negative film. Por H (high contrast) and Neg. Pro S (medium contrast). Of course, these are digital emulations, and they are far from the chemical processes of the real films but the emulation based on many years of experience leads to very good results, which is seen in the shots made by X-Pro1.